Boobs Can Be a Joy--in Fiction

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

of the editorial page staff

published by the StarTribune

April 29, 1961   

   SOME of the most engaging characters I ever knew were boobs I encountered while reading for fun.  I don't read for fun much any more.  This particular art form is going the way of the taffy pull, the basket social and loafing.

   We don't have the time for it now.  We're too busy wearing ourselves out with leisure-time activity.  We read mainly to be informed.  This is commendable, of course, but we don't even do enough of that.  And if I'd never read for fun I'd never have met Ring Lardner's Jack Keefe, the dumb but opinionated ball player; James Thurber's mousy but imaginative Walter Mitty, or P.G. Wodehouse's befuddled and self-righteous English gentleman, Bertie Wooster.

   Keefe, Mitty and Wooster are not important characters in literatrure.  You won't find them snuggled up in school libraries with Hamlet, David Copperfield, Huckleberry Finn, Ivanhoe or King Arthur.  They are three fumbling jerks caught in the toils of ignorance and inadequacy.

   I FANCY that most folks of my vintage are familiar with them.  Those who arrived late should get away from the television sets, phonographs, radios, comic books and cars long enough to experience the pleasure.

James Thurber

P.G. Wodehouse

   But they probably won't.  Sustained reading has become rather old hat.  We read in snatches now, 15 minutes to half an hour from magazines and newspapers--and the more pictures the better.  Good storytellers are dying off for want of demand.  The fiction market has shrunk.  The accent is on facts--facts on business, history, defense, delinquency, do-it-yourself hocus-pocus and how to prepare Johnny for life.

   The fellow who reads a book a month has become almost an oddity and among us are those who don't read one a year.  When we do tackle a book it's either because we think it will do us good or because everyone else is reading it and we don't want to be shut out of the conversation.

   WHEN DID you last come upon a book you had to read for sheer pleasure?  Not for the light it might shed on the space race or our drift into materialism but for the laughs it contained?  This joy came to me the other day when "The Best of Botts"** caught my eye.

   I've followed Alexander (the Great) Botts, the Earthworm tractor salesman with the high octane ego and low I.Q., for some 30 years, off and on.  He's never let me down and here was my chance for a sustained crack at him.  I went for the book like a kid for the cookie jar.

   THE STORIES about this indomitable, thick-hided halfwit are much alike.  Bott's fatheaded effrotery gets him into one jam after another but he always emerges triumphant.  As author William Hazlett Upson leads him deeper and deeper into the gumbo, the reader has an absorbing time trying to anticipate the twists of fate that will haul him back to dry land, muddy but victorious.

   If I can get my 12-year-old to sit still long enough,, I'm going to read a Botts story to him and see if he's absorbed even remotely to the degree I was at his age when dad gathered the family around the stove and read Ring Lardner yarns.

   I DOUBT that it will hold his interest, not because my son lacks a sense of humor but because he is the product of a time with different tastes and different values, an era of quickie amusement provided by the flick of a switch.
   But I hope that Botts, Keefe, Mitty and Wooster aren't lost to him forever.  Years from now, I trust, he'll take time to feast on the laughs they provide.  I'm sure he'll regret having waited so long.

William Hazlett Upson

**THE BEST OF BOTTS,

    by William Hazlett Upson

    (David McKay Co.,Inc.,

    $3.95, 241 pages)

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